Automatically update storage use bar during a job

I've noticed that during some of my BE 2012 D2D2T jobs, the "used" portion of the tape stays the same in Storage dasboard's display bar until the duplicate phase ends, after which it jumps the full amount written to the tape.

It would be great if this was updated during the job. This is more of a "quality of life" issue -- if you're monitoring a backup job while it's duplicating a terabyte of data to the tape it means you can do a spot check (and predict if you need a second tape!) in much less time.

The storage dashboard appears to aspire to be a more-or-less real-time display (For example, each devce's green "Active" arrow appears and disappears awheneer BE starts or stops using the device). More consistent behavior would make me trust this dashboard more and save me time.

Even if you're using hardware compression on the tape, there should be some way to estimate bytes written to the tape and update the bar accordingly.

How does that help? You should always have sufficient tapes BEFORE you start a backup/duplicate. If you don't and you are not using barcode labels, you would be forced to cancel the job because there is no way to introduce an overwritable tape into the tape library.

This doesn't have anything to do with avoiding a full tape; it's more about workflow and time management.

I put a tape in on Friday and some backups run over the weekend, and some get duplicated to tape. There is ALWAYS enough room. Sometimes the duplicate phase takes extra long (btw verifies have slowed to a crawl since SP4 got instaled). When I come in on Monday the first thing I check after opening Backup Exec is whether all of the required backup sets are on the tape. If the storage bar shows that only a fraction of the tape is used, it's a flag that something might be wrong. Or it might just be a duplication phase still running.

If that bar updated continuously as data was written to it, I could more quickly gauge how much time I had to wait before ejecting the tape and sending it offsite.

Alerts are useless because I get spammed with alerts from individual members of a storage pool when jobs targeting the pool are running.